Susan Grimm

Composite Icarus. Unsheltered puff. If there were numbers on the sky, you would parse the

passage of time. But our bodies do that for us.

Windstream. Datastream. Frantic turban of air. Translating gusty banners in the wake of the world.

You shift your attention, front. Faint scent of mortality and gratings of oil. The first law of the

windmill—no laying down on the job.

Oracle of the highway. Kaleidoscope with one scene. Grinding the morning exceedingly small.

Who gets your energy.

Susan Grimm’s poems have appeared in Cincinnati Poetry Review, Poetry East, The Journal, and other publications. Her chapbook, Almost Home, was published by the Cleveland State University Poetry Center in 1997. Her book of poems, Lake Erie Blue, was published by BkMk Press in 2004. She also edited Ordering the Storm: How to Put Together a Book of Poems, published by Cleveland State University Poetry Center in 2006. In 2010, she won the inaugural Copper Nickel Poetry Prize, and in 2011, she won the Hayden Carruth Poetry Prize (Tygerburning Literary Journal). Her chapbook, Roughed Up by the Sun’s Mothering Tongue, was published by Finishing Line Press in 2011. She blogs at The White Space Inside the Poem.